Brad Fielder & Dan Martin (Song Swap at The Deli)

Peerless Pickers Swap Songs

A pair of Oklahoma’s pre­mier song­writ­ers shar­ing a stage should draw a crowd. But if it’s Monday night the week before finals in a uni­ver­sity town, maybe not. Thus when Brad Fielder and Dan Martin started their late-night set at Campus Corner dive The Deli, [Sidenote: The Deli has prob­a­bly facil­i­tated the life­work of 10,000 alco­holics since open­ing on Campus Corner in 1973, but you’ve got to give them credit for their com­mit­ment to live enter­tain­ment. With live music seven days a week, their musi­cians’ res­i­den­cies have pro­vided bread-and-but­ter for count­less artists. And in some cases they’ve kick-started careers: Parker Millsap’s Tuesday night res­i­dency at The Deli (begun before he was drink­ing-age) launched him on a tra­jec­tory that’s still ris­ing.] the only audi­ence besides me and one other cus­tomer were the audio engi­neer, the bar­tender, and four loud-mouthed boys-in-men’s-bodies. The lat­ter were more inter­ested in dis­cussing strip clubs than show­ing def­er­ence to the artistry on dis­play. Their loss. At least they left after the third song.

I’ve writ­ten else­where about Fielder’s and Martins’ song­writ­ing, but addi­tion­ally they are both excel­lent per­form­ers and play­ers. In Fielder’s case espe­cially, every per­for­mance is marked by mas­ter­ful instru­men­tal tech­nique, even after six beers and two shots of whiskey! The singers’ mutual respect and easy-going cama­raderie lent a loose and plea­sur­able air to this writer’s late Monday evening.

Gallery

Technical

The pho­tographs in this story were taken with a Hasselblad medium-for­mat film cam­era on Kodak Tri-X. This was my first time using the Zeiss 150MM lens and I missed focus on the last two images; I pro­vide them for pos­ter­ity only.

Camera

Hasselblad 503CX with A12 back

Lenses

Carl Zeiss Distagon CF T* 50mm ƒ/4,0 (fig­ures 1 – 4)

Carl Zeiss Planar C T* 80mm ƒ/2,8 (fig­ures 5 – 8)

Carl Zeiss Sonnar CF T* 150mm ƒ/4,0 (fig­ures 9 – 11)

Aperture

ƒ/​8

Exposure

¹⁄₁₂₅^th second

ISO

400

Strobe

Vivitar 285HV pow­ered by Quantum Instruments Turbo SC com­pact slim power pack

Film

Kodak Tri-X 400 Professional 120

Developer

Adox Adonal (Rodinal) 1:100

~60 min­utes semi-stand in Paterson Super System 4 day­light tank

Scanner

Epson Perfection v850

Software

Vuescan

Adobe Lightroom 6

NIK Silver Efex Pro